Web merchants sell a variety of items using web sites accessed by customers over the Internet or similar networks. These items can include virtually anything that can be purchased, such as physical products like cameras, data products like e-books, services, and subscriptions, among others.
Web merchants provide customers with a rich shopping experience at any time, from virtually anywhere in the world. Customers accessing a web merchant's web site can obtain a variety of information about items, and place orders for them. Shoppers increasingly favor this form of shopping for its high levels of convenience and purchase-satisfaction.
Web merchants benefit when they are able to generate interest in their web sites that leads to customers shopping at their web sites and ultimately placing orders for items there. One way of generating interest in a website is for the website to become known as the place to shop in order to find and purchase the newest and most popular products. Identifying these products to market to consumers, however, has often been a hit-or-miss proposition for retailers. Some new products have launched to great fanfare and promise, only to fail in the marketplace, and other products have launched to little publicity but have captured the public's interest and seen sales soar. Retailers have typically been forced to rely on the in-house expertise of buyers in order to identify the next “big” products, and errors in such identification often leads to excess unsold inventory or items sold at a significant discount. Moreover, improved forecasting techniques that could tell a manufacturer of the expected demand for an item would greatly assist the manufacturer to more accurately predict how much of the item needs to be manufactured. As a result, it would be beneficial to have an improved system and technique to assist a web merchant in identifying more relevant items to customers and to guide manufacturers as to expected demand.